Tuesday, 11 December 2012

Let them drink craft beer!

Mark Daniels is a long-standing columnist for The Publican and The Morning Advertiser, and in the past I’ve sometimes linked to his comments as a good example of common sense, particularly with regard to the smoking ban.

But I have to say his latest column is very wide of the mark. Minimum Pricing won’t make alcohol expensive, he says. Well, in a sense it won’t. Anyone on a comfortable income won’t regard £3.20 for a four-pack of Carling, or £4.50 for a bottle of red, or £12.60 for a bottle of Scotch, as “expensive” in any meaningful sense. Although I’ve occasionally taken advantage of prices below that level, it won’t make any difference to the amount of off-trade drinks I buy.

But there are a lot of people, who buy a lot of drinks priced well below that level. If your £9.99 bottle of vodka goes up to £12.60, it will be an overnight increase of over 25%. It may not make it “expensive” in middle-class terms, but it will make it a lot more expensive.

Large numbers of people on modest incomes will experience very substantial increases in the prices of their regular alcohol purchases.

Sadly this is yet another example of the arrogance and delusion of so many involved in the pub trade. Making cheap alcohol dearer won’t bring a single extra customer into your pubs. It might generate rather more customers for the bootleggers, though.

As Churchill once said, “an appeaser is someone who feeds the crocodile hoping it will eat him last”. Well, good luck with that one, Mark.

" If your £9.99 bottle of vodka goes up to £12.60, it will be an overnight increase of over 25%. "

So you're saying anyone who wants to spent less than a tenner on a bottle of shit vodka will be priced out of not buying it because they couldn't afford the equivalent of the price of a pint on the way to the offie to buy it.Pull the other one,old cock.I agree it's a ludicrous price increase for all the wrong reasons except to make more cash for the posh boys in Government but moppers,topers and dipsos will always have the price of a pint in reserve.

@anonymous.You'll like this then. A stonking Tempranillo at £3.59 a bottle that regularly beats outrageously expensive plonk in tasting sessions.Perfect for Christmas quaffing, as they say.Here's to us tightwads !Cheers

I drink Lidl £3.59 Valdepenas. £4.22 represents a 17.5% increase and around £112 a year extra at 21 units a week. That's basic arithmetic - not a matter of opinion. Not much for me, but a lot for someone on the minimum wage. In the unlikely event of it becoming law, I'll be making my own for £1.30 a bottle. Others will be making it on a bigger scale and selling it to their neighbours; and others will be paying £1.80 a bottle in France and bringing it back. Once the price differential rises over 100%, it enables a larger, more commercial, black market, as both the transporter and the retailer can take a decent profit. That's what happened with rolling tobacco.

Professor Pie-Tin: @anonymous.You'll like this then. A stonking Tempranillo at £3.59 a bottle that regularly beats outrageously expensive plonk in tasting sessions.Perfect for Christmas quaffing, as they say.Here's to us tightwads !Cheers

http://www.aldi.co.uk/uk/html/product_range/product_range_18710.htm

Thank you very much indeed for bringing this to my attention. I went into Aldi and bought a bottle. I'm drinking it now.

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A Martin Scriblerus Blog

Salient quotations

"If I see one more politician who voted for the smoking ban crying crocodile tears about the state of the pub industry, I may throw up." (Chris Snowdon)

"The era of big, bossy, state interference, top-down lever pulling is coming to an end." (David Cameron, 2008)

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." (H. L. Mencken)

"The final nails have now been hammered into the coffin of the freedom to smoke in enclosed public places. This piece of legislation must be one of the most restrictive, spiteful and socially divisive imposed by any British Government. (Lord Stoddart of Swindon)

"Raising taxes on alcohol to prevent problem drinking is akin to raising the price of gasoline to prevent people from speeding." (Edward Peter Stringham)

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." (C. S. Lewis)

"People who deal only in 'craft' beer do not care about some dirty old pub and the dirty old people who are in it and the dirty old community that it holds together." (Boozy Procrastinator)

"There's a saying that, given time, all organisations end up as if they were run by a conspiracy of their foes." (Rhys Jones)

"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming 'Wow! What a Ride!" (Hunter S. Thompson)

"No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home at Weston-super-Mare." (Kingsley Amis)

"When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves,
For you will have lost the last of England." (Hilaire Belloc)

What's this all about?

This is not a beer blog. It's a view of life from the saloon bar, not entirely about the saloon bar - which of course is a metaphorical place as well as a physical one. It is as much about political correctness and the erosion of lifestyle freedom as it is about pubs and beer. And, while I enjoy cask beer, I don't assume that it is the only alcoholic beverage worth consuming.

I'm a non-smoker, but not an antismoker. I believe the owners of private property should be entitled to choose whether or not smoking is permitted on their premises. If any supporter of pubs still thinks the smoking ban was a remotely good idea, just look around at all the pubs that have closed since 1 July 2007. The smoking ban is what prompted the creation of this blog back then and, while it touches on many other topics, it remains essentially its core theme. However, there remains much to be enjoyed and celebrated in pubs despite the effects of the ban.

I condemn drunken driving, but there is no evidence that driving after consuming a small quantity of alcohol is dangerous, and the campaign to discourage driving even within the British legal limit has been a major cause of the decline of the pub trade in recent years. Reducing the current legal limit - a proposal fortunately rejected by the Coalition government - would lead to the closure of thousands more pubs and would not necessarily save a single life. In my view, this is at least as much a threat to pubs as the smoking ban.

As you will probably gather from reading the blog, I live in Stockport, Cheshire, a thriving town which is definitely not part of Manchester and has one of the finest collections of characterful pubs in the country.

The blog is written purely for my own entertainment and to get things off my chest. It walks a tightrope between libertarianism and conservatism. It is nostalgic, idiosyncratic and at times inconsistent. You are welcome to disagree, but if you don't like it, you don't have to read it.

I have no connection with the tobacco industry and receive no funding from it.